Introduction to the Special Issue on Foster Care

AS I SIT HERE WRITING THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE on psychoanalytic treatment of children in foster care, 437 children simultaneously removed from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Yearning for Zion Ranch, the “family” compound where the children are suspected to have been abused, are being dispersed into foster and group homes throughout the state of Texas. The authors represented in this issue hardly envisioned a foster care situation as extreme and extensive as this when they wrote or presented their papers, but our collective work in the foster care system over the last several decades tells us that these children, like all other foster children, could well benefit from the psychoanalytic understanding we have honed regarding trauma, attachment disruption, long-term psychological consequences, and the importance of continuous connections for the more than half million American children a year who find themselves in the foster care system. This issue includes the proceedings of an invited panel at the APA Division of Psychoanalysis (39) meetings in Toronto on April 1, 2007, “Talking the Talk, Walking the Walk: Bringing Psychoanalysis to Foster Children and Their Families” (Kelly Gin, April Fernando, Diane Ehrensaft, and Neil Altman as discussant), which was presented again on November 3, 2007, in San Francisco at a scientific meeting of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, this time with the title “Fostering of Agency: Psychoanalytic Views on Working with Foster Children,” with L. Eileen Keller as discussant. Two additional articles were chosen to demonstrate clinical work with foster youth who are survivors of torture (Esther Ehrensaft) and to offer a model for building a network of clinicians providing psychotherapy to foster children and youth in their communities (Toni Heineman). All of us who have made contributions to this issue have overlapped with each other in one way or anoth